Stepping Out From the Lens Of History;
Frozen Moments Alter Lives Of Subjects of 2 Famous Photos

By GEORGE JUDSON

Published: October 11, 1995

The 100 young photographers had come to a hillside in Sullivan County to learn from masters, to show off their talent, to make connections and perhaps to win their first big assignment. All that is possible at the Eddie Adams Workshop, where each October, veteran news photographers and editors gather for a weekend to tutor and to test the eye of the next generation.

Kim Phuc and Mary Ann Vecchio came to make connections, too.

When they stepped forward on Sunday in the workshop barn here to embrace the photographers who captured their images more than 20 years ago, they stepped out of two of the most famous photographs from the Vietnam War era -- a Vietnamese child burned by napalm running down a street; an American teen-ager kneeling over the body of a student at Kent State -- into the lives of those whose ambition is to find moments as powerful in their own time.

In a room full of news photographers, shutters whirred, but tears also welled at the shock of recognition, and at the slap of responsibility. Photographers go on to their next assignments, but their subjects often are bound by place and circumstance. For two decades, these women had been prisoners of their unsought fame.

Ms. Phuc, who was 9 in 1972 when her family's village was bombed, became a propaganda display for the Communist regime in Cuba, where she was taken for medical care, until she defected to Canada in 1992. Ms. Vecchio, a 14-year-old runaway who happened to be on the Kent State University campus when the Ohio National Guard opened fire on May 4, 1970, said she was stunned when she came under attack by public officials as a hated symbol of the anti-war movement.

"I clammed up about the whole thing for 24 years," Ms. Vecchio told the workshop after embracing John Filo, who was a photography student in 1970 when he caught her kneeling over the body of a slain student.

"I'd always dreamed about meeting John Filo," she said, recalling the moment only a few months before when they met for the first time. "I hoped he was O.K. I knew my life had been pretty much messed up by the photo."

Ms. Phuc, who was taken to a hospital by Nick Ut, an Associated Press photographer, after he took her picture as she emerged from a napalm fire, told the students: "I know that picture changed the world, and it changed my life. I don't want to remember that day."

Today, as the students prepared for a show of their work over the last four days that would win some of them assignments for National Geographic, Time and other magazines, they were still struck by meeting the people from images they had grown up with, and sharing the impact of the photographs.

"They were two of the most famous nonfamous people in the world," said Patrick Colquhoun, a freelance photographer from Old Saybrook, Conn.

Brennan Linsley, a young Associated Press photographer in Nicaragua, said, "I want to ask Eddie, Can we still take those kinds of pictures any more, or is everyone too numb?"

Eddie is Eddie Adams, who after decades of recording wars, statesmen and fashion, started the free workshop in his barn eight years ago with the support of Kodak and Nikon. A number of publications, including The New York Times, provide staff members to assist in the workshop.

Mr. Adams had almost succeeded in bringing one of his own subjects to speak, General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, whom he photographed point-blank in 1968 executing a Vietcong suspect in a Saigon street. The general said he was too ill.

Mr. Adams had made General Loan infamous, but he had stayed in touch. "When you get involved with your subject, say I take the picture of someone who is hurt or wounded, I find I become the person who I'm shooting," he said. "I'm hurt, I'm wounded, and I really feel it.

"I think a lot of really good photographers fall in love with their subjects, really. I don't know how to do it, but you want to keep in touch."

Mr. Adams recalled the first time he saw General Loan after the execution. "I was visiting his house in Virginia, after he was wounded, and he was teaching his little girl French," he said. "He wasn't a bad person. Pictures lie. They don't tell the whole picture."

Mr. Filo, who like Mr. Adams and Mr. Ut won a Pulitzer Prize for his photograph, acknowledged that power in introducing Ms. Vecchio. While he went on to a career as a newspaper photographer and magazine photo editor, she had drifted for years before marrying and settling in Las Vegas.

"I can't tell you all of the things that were released deep down in my psyche when I met Mary Ann," Mr. Filo told the students. "That photo was made by a 14-year-old, not a 20-year-old, not an 18-year-old, reacting to what she saw."

Mr. Ut, who has helped Ms. Phuc's family in Vietnam for many years, brought other photographs from the bombing to show that one picture, indeed, does not tell everything. To suggestions that the photo of her burned body was faked, he offers photographs of the bombs dropping from a plane, their explosion on the ground, her family carrying her two baby brothers, who died from their burns.

"I traveled everywhere in the DMZ, and every day I see bodies and bodies," Mr. Ut said. "After that day, I don't want to see any more of that."

Then everyone walked from the barn up the hill for a champagne toast around a memorial inscribed with the names of six photographers, all friends of Mr. Adams, who died covering the Vietnam War.

One was Mr. Ut's older brother, Huynh Thanh My, killed on an Associated Press assignment that Mr. Adams sent him on. "It was supposed to be me," Mr. Adams said. Another was Henri Huet, who in 1971 took Mr. Ut's place on a helicopter and died when it crashed.

The barn had long been a hangout for Mr. Adams's friends. When the idea of a workshop came to him, he said, "We thought of getting all of my heroes in one place, and really do it for me instead of the students."

After the first workshop, he said: "I thought something was missing. I thought how nice it would be if these guys who were killed could get involved.

"So even though we have photographers here who do underwater photos, who do fashion photos, one thing I wanted to point out with the memorial is that this is a fun job, it's a good job, but people do die."

Photos: Kim Phuc, the subject of Nick Ut's Pulitzer-prize winning photograph as she fled a 1972 napalm attack on her village in South Vietnam (John Filo/Associated Press), met the photographer at a workshop last weekend. She placed flowers Sunday on a memorial to photographers killed on the job. (Gene Pierce); Mary Ann Vecchio, whose reaction to the body of a Kent State student killed by the National Guard in 1970 spurred anti-war sentiment (Photograph by Nick Ut/Associated Press), placed flowers as Eddie Adams, left, in hat, the photographer who holds the annual workshop in his barn, watched. (Scott Allen)